She shook her head, the tears welling from under closed lids. Then she withdrew quietly from his arms.
"I couldn't do that, Ernie," she said.
He absorbed her with his eyes. Her gabardine, smocked at the breast, shewed the noble lines of her bosom, fuller and firmer than of old. It was open at the neck and revealed the amber necklace bound about a throat that was round and massive as a pillar, and touched to olive by the sun.
Alf was walking away towards the bridge which threw a red-brick span across the stream some hundreds of yards distant. Cows moved in the meadow. One came towards him along the tow-path, lowing in the dusk.
Alf stopped and watched it. He did not like cows: he did not like animals. "Machines are my line," he would say. "More sense in em." The cow, unaware of the disturbance she was causing in the other's breast, mooned forward. That was enough for Alf. On his right was a plank-bridge carelessly flung across the stream. Alf did not like plank-bridges either, but he preferred them to cows. And placed as he now was between the Devil and the Deep Sea, he chose the Deep Sea without a moment's hesitation, because he knew that here at least the Sea was fairly shallow.
He crossed the plank-bridge—on his hands and knees. The pair under the willow watched in silence with an awed curiosity.
"He's frit," murmured Ruth, the light and laughter peeping through her clouds.
"He's always frit, Alf is," Ernie answered out of the experience of thirty years.
"Alfs always is," commented Ruth.
Alf, the astounding, the perils of land and sea behind him, now rose from his humiliating position, and well knowing he had been watched, waved with the stupid bravado that is a form of self-defence towards the willow clump.